cuttleflow
Systems
PerspectivesEssays and field notes

Perspectives

Everything we publish, in one place: a series on the economics of delegated authority, and shorter technical notes on making governed underwriting hold up in an audit. Written for the people who have to run it.

The series — the economics of delegated authority

Short pieces on how this market actually pays: what underwriters want, what brokers reward, what capacity rewards, and what a buyer is really paying for when an agency changes hands.

Perspective 01

What people actually want

It is not features. Four numbers matter: cost to start, cost to run, cost to connect, revenue per person.

Perspective 02

What underwriters actually want

Every feature request is a request to buy back judgement time — and every hour bought back becomes premium.

Perspective 03

Written once: the economics of straight-through processing

The back office stops producing the close and starts verifying it. Cost to run detaches from premium.

Perspective 04

What brokers reward

Brokers allocate business; they are not just a channel. Flow follows ease, and ease is priced in minutes per placement.

Perspective 05

What capacity rewards

Your line is priced on what it costs to trust you. Reduce the oversight cost and the ceiling moves.

Perspective 06

What the client is actually buying

The whole chain is funded by one person. Four currencies, only one of which appears on an invoice.

Perspective 07

What a buyer pays for

Earnings times a multiple — and the multiple is the buyer’s price for doubt.

Perspective 08

The end of small

Every advantage that made a large insurer large was a fixed cost. A fixed cost that becomes rentable stops being an advantage.

Perspective 09

The claim, paid locally

Everything before the claim is a promise. The claim is delivery — and the fast local payer wins it outright.

Perspective 10

Six speeds, one clock

Speed to quote gets the attention. It is the first of six — and five of them are decided at bind.

Perspective 11

The declinature drawer

The hardest placements don’t die of price. They die of routing — and every discarded decline was data.

Perspective 12

The pen is portable

The skill is already entrepreneurial. Only the payslip isn’t — and the arithmetic of leaving has never read better.

Perspective 13

The market that wants founders

Capacity says it is cautious about new agencies. Its money says the opposite. The gap is the cost of trust — and it is falling.

Perspective 14

The arithmetic of legacy

Everyone agrees the incumbents should modernise. The mathematics explains why they mostly cannot.

Each piece is published here as an HTML page once cleared — readable, linkable and quotable, rather than a PDF download.

Field notes — technical, occasional

Working notes on governed insurance infrastructure: determinism on the bind path, wordings as shared infrastructure, and evidence as a by-product of work.

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One list for everything above. Occasional only, and no noise.